Create your own tag cloud from any text to visualize word frequency.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I make a text cloud?

There are three ways of entering text into TagCrowd to generate a text cloud: 1) Enter the URL for a web page you wish to visualize (starting with "http://"); 2) Paste (or type) the text you wish to visualize into the text box; 3) Upload a plain text file to visualize. There's a 6 MB file size maximum on uploaded files, while it's a 3 megabyte limit on pasted text. It's highly recommended that you upload large text files instead of pasting, as you may run into memory limits of your browser.

After providing your text source, hit the Visualize! button to see the result with the default options. You now have several options available to tweak your cloud into a form you're happy with.

Language of text:

Choose the written language of the text you are visualizing. TagCrowd maintains a list of common words (called a 'stop list') for each supported language so these words won't show up in your text cloud. If you wish to turn this function off, select 'none' for the language. If there are additional words you want to remove from your text cloud, see "Ignore words from a custom stoplist" below.

Maximum number of words to show:

TagCrowd works by counting the frequency of every word in your source text and visualizing the top N of these as a text cloud. You set this value of N with this field. The appropriate value will depend on your application and the size of your source text. In general, it's better to use smaller clouds for shorter source texts and larger clouds for longer source texts.

Minimum freqency:

Words must appear at least this number of times in order to show up in the text cloud. For example, if you enter '3' for the minimum frequency, only words that appear three or more times in your text source will be included in your text cloud.

Show frequencies:

Marking 'yes' here will display the actual number of times each word appears in your text source.

Ignore words from a custom stoplist:

A stop list is a list of 'stop words' that you don't want to appear in your text cloud. This will depend on your application so TagCrowd lets you create your own custom stop list.

Group similar words (English only):

TagCrowd uses the standard Porter Stemming Algorithm to detect and combine similar words. For example, the words 'teachers', 'teaching' and 'teach' will all be combined so your text cloud is less redundant. The most frequent of the variants is chosen to represent them all. In the case of a tie, the shorter variant is used.

Can I use TagCrowd for commercial purposes?

While TagCrowd is free for non-commercial/educational use, if you want to use TagCrowd in a commercial setting, i.e. in the course of doing something you are paid to do or making something you plan to sell, purchase a super cheap license to use TagCrowd without restriction. If in doubt about whether your purpose requires a license, just drop us a line.

License fees support future features development and help defray hefty server costs. Your patronage is much appreciated.

Is the data I input confidential?

The text you enter into TagCrowd is not stored anywhere, nor is it ever shared with anyone. You are the only one who will ever see what you put in and get out of TagCrowd. That said, data transfers on unencrypted channels are by nature insecure. So you can have about as much confidence in the privacy of your data with TagCrowd as you do with sending unencrypted email.

How do I create or print a gif/jpg/png/pdf of my text cloud?

You can create an image of the text cloud by taking a screenshot or printing to a PDF. Here are screenshot instructions for Windows. On a Mac, just hit Apple-Shift-4 and drag a box around the cloud you want to save; you'll get a screenshot image on your desktop. If you use Linux, you probably already know how to do this.

How do I keep multiple words together in the cloud (e.g. 'New York')?

The simplest way to keep multi-word terms and phrases together is to do a find & replace on the original text file and insert a hyphen between the words you want to group. For example: replace 'New York' with 'New-York', 'text cloud' with 'text-cloud', etc.

Does TagCrowd work for non-English languages?

TagCrowd is Unicode compliant and offers basic support for many languages. Choose the language of your source text in the Options section of the TagCrowd application. "Basic support" currently means languages based on the Latin alphabet (i.e. most of Europe), and all accented characters are converted to plain characters. For example, the characters é, ä, ç become e, a, c. Since this is the first international version of TagCrowd, there will certainly be some bugs. Please let us know if you find any.

TagCrowd can only support languages for which we have a list of common words, known as a 'stop list' or 'stop words'. Currently supported languages include Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish and Swedish. (Click on your language to see the stop words we are using -- be sure to view them with Unicode UTF8 text encoding.)

Let us know if you want to suggest additional stop words for these languages. And if TagCrowd doesn't currently work in your language, please send us a list of common words in your language.

How does the URL text source work?

TagCrowd reads the web document at the address you provide and extracts the text, ignoring the HTML code that surrounds it. It doesn't crawl the whole domain (yet). TagCrowd can't discriminate between content text and extraneous text like navigation menus, so if you want a more focused cloud, try copy/pasting the exact text you want to visualize.

How can I make a cloud of a very long text file?

Upload your file. The max file size is 6 MB (more than the size of Shakespeare's complete works). Max for pasting is somewhere around 3 MB, and may depend more on your browser and computer than TagCrowd servers.

How do I embed my text cloud in a web page?

When you generate your text cloud, you'll see a box of HTML code below the cloud. Copy and paste the code into any web page that allows in-line stylesheets. Feel free to modify the colors and font sizes in the stylesheet to customize your cloud, as long as you keep the reference to TagCrowd. You can also add URLs into the links so the words in the cloud link somewhere. This code should work with most blog software -- but not all. If it doesn't, try moving the style information from the code into your blog's external stylesheet. We're working on a way to improve compatibility.

Is there a TagCrowd API?

Not yet. This is a highly requested feature, and we're researching how to do it best. If you have specific requests for what you'd like to see in a TagCrowd API, please let us know and/or suggest other web services you like that could serve as good role models.